Yesterday I really started to dig into all the various laptops I have owned over the years. Getting a new laptop used to be an extremely joyous time filled with promise and adventure. It was seriously exciting. It was an event. I packed that Hewlett-Packard (HP) Pavilion ze5300 laptop in my backup and carried it all over the United States. In retrospect, it was a very heavy and extremely noisy computing device that had absolutely horrible battery life. A few years can offer a fresh perspective on things. In the technology world something that seemed epic can quickly fall into the background. Ultimately as the technology we use fades into the background the actual things we focus on have to come to the forefront. As technology fades the path to a prefect possible future has to come into picture. We are moving ever closer to the intersection of technology and modernity. At the point where technology becomes ubiquitous it will either be the fulcrum driving action or a tool used to drive action. Within that distinction is probably the most important difference that can be stated. Within our perfect possible future technology has to be a tool for good and not inherently the plumbing of our civil society.
Things got a little deeper in the last paragraph than they usually do at 05:00 hours, but that happens sometimes. It could be all the nostalgia that has been building up for a time before quarantine. I did seriously entertain the idea of buying a Pavilion ze5300 laptop yesterday on eBay. If the one for sale had included the power supply, then it would probably have been an impulse purchase that would be delivered sometime next week. I do not need or want a laptop that old. My current Corsair Cube cube custom build computer runs just fine and is the primary device I’m using for writing these days. Maybe next year I’ll go down the path of building out a new workstation, but that is not happening right now. I have seen a few builds with four district graphics cards in the case that could be pretty epic. Right now I’m doing development that runs in a Jupyter notebook. That pretty much means that the underlying hardware is less of a problem than writing code that just works. This early in the morning the only writing that is going to happen is a bit of stream of consciousness style prose. That happens every day now in a way that is almost starting to become a daily writing habit.
Yesterday afternoon, I replaced the tremolo block on a Fender deluxe stratocaster guitar body. Whatever metal block that came with the body that was purchased on eBay was replaced with a very heavy brass tremolo block. I meant to do a pure tone comparison recording before and after, but the process of doing the change was so easy that it was over in about 20 minutes. I have a ton of recordings using my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface. Surprisingly the audio interface was super easy to use and setup. Using a standard cabled cabinet simulated output from a tube amplifier the audio interface just directly captures the sound of the guitar. That is about as simple a method to capture audio as I could manage to set up in my home office. It just worked from the start with no real configuration for troubleshooting. I’m not sure if either the new brass tremolo block or maybe refitting the custom neck to body added a lot of sustain. It is probably the combination of both things that helped make the guitar really ring out.
